Historically in Ontario, when the Liberals are in power in Ottawa, voters elect a Conservative provincial government. [...] One explanation for this seesaw is that voters aim for balance: a more progressive party at one level of government, and a more conservative party at the other level.

Regardless of the dynamics of electoral swings, the quandary for Ford is that if Trudeau is re-elected in the fall of 2025, Ford can be fairly certain of victory a few months later. But if Trudeau and the Liberals falter, and a Conservative government under Pierre Poilievre takes power in Ottawa, Ontario voters are less likely to grant a third consecutive term to the provincial Conservatives.

In other words, Ford worries that a pivot to the Conservatives in Ottawa will compromise, or doom, his re-election bid in Ontario.

As such, Ford has an incentive to hold the provincial election a year early, in the spring of 2025, when the Liberals will likely still be in power in Ottawa.

Or will they?Trudeau would undoubtedly prefer that Conservatives were running the show in Ontario during the next federal election campaign. The many seats in the province, and especially in the Greater Toronto region, are essential for a federal Liberal victory. With Ford still ruling, the federal Liberals hope to once again capture these ridings.

Palestinians calling home to Gaza on Skype have had their digital lives destroyed, after Microsoft closed their email accounts without warning.

BBC News has spoken to 20 Palestinians living abroad who say Microsoft, which owns the voice and video chat app, kicked them out of their accounts. The total number affected is thought to be much higher.

In some cases, these email accounts are more than 15 years old and the users have no way to retrieve emails, contacts or memories.

Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - but will not say how - and the decision is final.

The Gazans say they have no links to Hamas - designated as a terrorist organisation by some Western countries, including the US, where Microsoft is headquartered - and accuse the technology giant, the most valuable company in the world, of persecuting them unfairly.

Here's the full roster with their current pro teams:

• Nickeil Alexander-Walker (Minnesota Timberwolves)
• RJ Barrett (Toronto Raptors)
• Khem Birch (Basquet Girona, Spain)
• Dillon Brooks (Houston Rockets)
• Lu Dort (Oklahoma City Thunder)
• Melvin Ejim (Unicaja, Spain)
• Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Oklahoma City Thunder)
• Trey Lyles (Sacramento Kings)
• Jamal Murray (Denver Nuggets)
• Andrew Nembhard (Indiana Pacers)
• Kelly Olynyk (Toronto Raptors)
• Dwight Powell (Dallas Mavericks)

The Women's National team, which has a much longer history of success than the Mens', announced their roster on July 2nd. Canada will also be sending a Women's 3x3 basketball team to the Paris Olympics

Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.^8^

In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death^9^ to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip.

Toronto (CNW) – July 4, 2024 / More than 9,000 LCBO workers will be out on strike as of 12:01 midnight tonight after talks broke down at the bargaining table. OPSEU/SEFPO, the union representing the workers, has said all along that this round of bargaining is like no other.

“Doug Ford wants to make life better for his wealthy friends. It’s why he’s wasting upwards of a billion dollars of our money to fast-track privatized alcohol sales and hand more of the public revenues generated by the LCBO over to the CEOs and big box grocery and convenience chains like Loblaws and Circle K,” said OPSEU/SEFPO President JP Hornick.

When you buy from the LCBO, including spirit-based ready-to-drink beverages, that should help build Ontario – not pay for a billionaire’s new yacht.

Right now, 70% of LCBO workers are casual – they don’t have guaranteed hours, which means most won’t have access to benefits and there aren’t opportunities to move into permanent part-time and full-time positions. We want a better future for our members, the LCBO, and Ontario.

I’ve been at this university for the past three years and I’ve been pretty limited in my engagement with other disciplines. I tend to speak to the same people who take the same classes as me. This is one of the first times that I feel myself engaging with the academic community here. I’ve witnessed people put their studies to use: engineering students have stopped our canopies from leaking when it rains, urban planning students organized the setup of our tents, and philosophy and humanities students created a beautiful library space and held reading circles. It feels as if we have taken our classes and put them into practice.

Being at the Circle is one of the only times on campus I have felt a Palestinian presence. This university has a habit of alienating Palestinians, especially in the last eight months. There is an active genocide going on and academic departments refuse to acknowledge it. I have watched my professors get more and more uncomfortable when people bring up Palestine. They act as if senior administrators will pop in at any time and fire them on the spot.

The Circle is the only place on campus where I feel we can talk about Palestine for what it is and what it can be.

A foreign multinational company can export Canadian blood plasma products for profit abroad, The Breach has learned. That flies in the face of what’s been pledged by Canadian Blood Services and Grifols, the Spanish multinational corporation that is trying to open private plasma collection centres across Ontario and already operates in some other provinces. But the revelation that they can export products for sale overseas is the first window into a secret contract the company signed with Canada’s blood authority in 2022 to allow them to pay for blood plasma.

Grifols hit a roadblock on Monday, as Hamilton’s Public Health Committee unanimously backed a resolution from Mayor Andrea Horwath to reject a planned Grifols collection centre and declare the city a “paid-plasma-free zone.” Horwath said that “anything that preys upon the most vulnerable is hideous and doesn’t belong in Hamilton.”

That deal between Grifols and Canada’s blood authority has accelerated an assault on the voluntarism that has been at the core of blood and plasma collection in Canada for decades, and quickened the country’s shift toward a for-profit system.

Critics have often invoked the example of the United States, where private centres operate in low-income neighbourhoods, paying poor people to sell their plasma so multinational companies can manufacture expensive drugs for large profits.

The privatization of blood and plasma collection goes against the founding principles of Canadian Blood Services, a national charity that manages blood supply outside of Quebec. It was created to keep donations voluntary after the “tainted blood” scandal of the 1980s, which resulted in 8,000 Canadians dying from improperly screened, infected blood from paid donors through a for-profit donation system.

Paying for blood donations remains banned in British Columbia, Quebec, and Ontario. But Doug Ford’s Conservative government quietly gave a green light to Grifols earlier this year, appearing to accept the Canadian blood authority’s argument that the Spanish company is acting as an “agent” of Canadian Blood Services.

https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112535649882421445

Liberal health critic Adil Shamji wants the province to ban private-pay nurse practitioner clinics instead of waiting on the feds to do so. His private member's bill, to be tabled Wednesday afternoon, would do just that. The Keeping Primary Care Fair Act would also increase penalties for breaking the law. Shamji shared an advance copy with The Trillium.

As primary care shortages persist in Ontario, private-payer nurse practitioner clinics have come under scrutiny for openly charging patients fees to access primary care services normally provided by a family doctor.

Though charging for services covered under provincial medicare programs is illegal under the Canada Health Act, some nurse practitioners say they're exempt because they're not allowed to bill public insurance. Not everyone agrees with that interpretation.

"The reality is that there's something that can be done right now by the provincial Minister of Health, and she is, in my opinion, refusing deliberately to act," he said.

Two other Conservative-led provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, have taken steps to bring nurse practitioners under the public system, he noted. Ontario also funds some public nurse practitioner clinics that do not charge patients. Shamji's bill would not affect those.

As the Ford government expands publicly funded, privately delivered health care, Shamji said he's convinced [Ford's Health Minister] Jones has "a deliberate privatization agenda that is communicated, if not by her words, certainly by her actions."

Major oil companies have in recent years made splashy climate pledges to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and take on the climate crisis, but a new report suggests those plans do not stand up to scrutiny.

The research and advocacy group Oil Change International examined climate plans from the eight largest US- and European-based international oil and gas producers — BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Eni, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies — and found none were compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels — a threshold scientists have long warned could have dire consequences if breached.

The report’s authors used 10 criteria and ranked each aspect of each company’s plan on a spectrum from “fully aligned” to “grossly insufficient” and found all eight companies ranked “grossly insufficient” or “insufficient” on nearly all criteria.

The authors also found that the companies’ current oil and gas extraction plans could lead to more than 2.4C of global temperature rise, which would probably usher in climate devastation. The eight firms alone are on track to use 30% of the world’s remaining global carbon budget to keep global average temperature rise to 1.5C, the study found.

The report, in its fourth annual edition, was endorsed by more than 200 climate groups internationally. Since the first edition of the report in 2020, many oil companies have rolled back climate pledges amid spiking fossil fuel prices.“ The Big Oil Reality Check data illustrates these companies’ dangerous commitment to profit at all cost,” said Tong. It follows a March report from the thinktank Carbon Tracker, which found none of the world’s 25 largest fossil fuel companies’ production and transition plans align with the central goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

In 2023, a shocking one out of every five people in Canada were food insecure — defined as having a lack of access to food, or concern over lack of food access. Severe food insecurity — when people miss meals and sometimes go days without food — rose by 50 per cent.

The Globe and Mail reported that Per Bank, the new CEO of Loblaw Companies Ltd., made $22 million from two months of work in 2023 — including an $18 million signing bonus. That’s 500 times more than the yearly median income in Canada.

Galen Weston Jr., Loblaw’s president, blamed suppliers, who forced “unjustified” price increases on the company. Others, like the Conservatives, blame the carbon tax for raising prices. In a report, the Centre for Future Work found that there is an infinitesimally small correlation between carbon pricing and inflation — just 0.15 per cent.

When prices spike, corporations take advantage. According to Statistics Canada, food prices were twice as high as the overall inflation rate — which was at its highest level in almost 40 years. Meanwhile, since 2020, Canadian food retailers have nearly tripled profit margins and doubled profits — making $6 billion per year. It’s not difficult to do the math. This is called “greedflation” — companies taking advantage of inflation to raise prices even higher.

Meanwhile, Canada’s top three food retailers (Loblaw, Sobey’s and Metro) control 57 per cent of food sales. Loblaw alone takes home 27 per cent. Costco and Walmart are next in line at 11 per cent and 7.5 per cent respectively, according to 2022 statistics.

The boycott has focused the country on the affordability crisis and the role of corporate profiteering. However, the responsibility for change does not fall on the consumer, but rather those in government, who are ultimately the ones with the tools to curtail corporate greed. Reigning in corporate profiteering, curtailing oligopolies, building holistic approaches to food provisioning and supporting incomes to match the cost of living are the real changes we need. On May 30 at 1 p.m. EST, Food Secure Canada is hosting a webinar titled "Greedflation: The role of large corporations in food price inflation and what can be done about it." You can register here.

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.

Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.

Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.

Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.

In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.